Posts Tagged ‘Unconventional thinking’

Just ask UA, and the PAP and they’ll say “Cost and cenvenience matters more than quality of service”.

[UA] has just had a great month. Of course, there was the odd hiccup. First, the video of a bloodied United passenger being dragged off an overbooked flight for the crime of wanting to stay in the seat he had paid for. Then there was the giant rabbit, en route from London to Chicago to compete for the title of world’s largest bunny, who died in United custody with lawyers alleging the airline put the live beast in a freezer for 16 hours. Then there was the airline’s apology to the Paris-bound passenger who ended up in San Francisco instead. And the flyer whose trip was cancelled after he taped an argument with a United employee.

Yet despite this month of PR disasters, United is doing fine. Better than fine, in fact. The airline announced this week that it had its best month of the year in April, beating all of its main rivals in key metrics.

Roger Wicker, a Republican senator from Mississippi, had a different explanation: “There’s not enough competition in the industry.”

George Cherian would agree, He has commented on FB that

The PAP’s marketing of democracy and human rights as “bad products” as you put it is only half the story. The other half: the PAP ensures that it operates in a protected market where those selling the competing product are “taxed” practically out of existence, by placing obstacles in their ability to organise, and destroying careers of activists. It’s not because there aren’t “good marketeers” among Singaporeans who care about these issues. It’s because they are in a market completely different from the example you cite.

Debauched nights in the courts of caliphates were enshrined in the khamriyaat, or odes to wine, by Abu Nuwas, an eighth-century poet. Nobody knows exactly when Islamic scholars decided that booze was sinful … A handful of scholars permit alcohol as long as it is not made from grapes and dates, because these are specifically mentioned in the Koran. But nobody dares open the debate. “No religious scholar is ready to accept the consequences of a fatwa by now saying that beer, spirits, vodka are halal,” says Anas Aboshady, a scholar at the influential al-Azhar University in Cairo.

The tendency to take risky, irrational bets to avoid losses nearly disappeared for those tested the foreign language …

Mr Kahneman … posits two general systems of thinking: System 1, intuitive and quick, good for most purposes, but prone to those pesky cognitive traps; and System 2, deliberative and slow, better at higher reasoning but effortful to activate and keep active. The brain, which minimises effort where it can, leans on System 1 wherever possible. But modern life presents many problems better suited to System 2.

The hypothesis behind the “foreign-language effect” is that speaking the foreign language activates System 2 in advance of tackling the tricky questions … Another possible result might have been that using the foreign language tires the brain, and that this fatigue might make people more, not less, prone to mistakes. Mr Kahneman, after all, describes “ego depletion” leading to bad choices in other studies. But in this study, the effect of priming System 2 appears to have been stronger than any fatigue effect.